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What is the best practice for anchor text?

by skyvia
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have read that it is better to use words that are closely related to your theme when creating anchor text for back links so as not to look too spammy by search engines.

I would like to know whether this is true and if it is true, if these other words can only be other keywords that you might be targeting on the same page or LSI words that have been deemed relevant to your theme by search engines.

thanks
#anchor #practice #text
  • Profile picture of the author adelainewatson
    Getting incoming links to your website from other sites is very important for your ranking in search engines, but it has a huge difference what the anchor text is.

    For instance, when I leave a comment on a blog or as a sig file in a forum I put a good keyword "marketing tips" after my name.

    When people search for "marketing tips" in the search engines, there is a bigger possibility that my blog will show up in the results rather than if I only used my name as anchor text.
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  • Profile picture of the author kaiserthesage
    You can search for other "support keywords" for your main keyword that have substantial monthly search count to be used as variations for your anchor texts when building links. and yes, it can affect/improve your main keyword's rankings. Example:

    SEO Tools <- your main keyword

    Support keywords:
    Free SEO Tools
    Cheap SEO Tools
    Buy SEO Tools
    Best SEO Tools
    Best Free SEO Tools
    Best Cheap SEO Tools
    Advanced SEO Tools
    SEO Tool

    Which all can direct to one page. You may also target these long-tails through blog posts. I've written an article about this strategy before, you can check it out here:
    Anchor Text Link Strategy
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    Co-founder and CEO of Grit and Xight Interactive. Author of Kaiserthesage. Follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre

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  • Profile picture of the author ScrapeBoss
    From my own experience, the best way for creating anchor texts is to make them related to your site. Anchor texts are off-page SEO and they are considered with on-page SEO in search engine results. Optimize each keyword for specific pages of your website. Many anchor texts pointing back to your site with a particular keyword related to the content of your web page will increase your search ranking.
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  • Profile picture of the author maryparker
    Start with your own on-site anchor text first. By that I mean the anchor text YOU use to link to your own pages from your own pages. This is especially true for sites that are already ranking fairly well.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason Carter
    Almost all the links I build I use the exact keyword that I am going for as the anchor text. What I find is some of the sites I put links on don't give any anchor text and will just let your website address be the link.

    So the only variation I have in anchor text is usually just from the sites that will not let me use anchor text.

    Later,
    Jason
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  • Profile picture of the author Abhinandangarg
    anchor text should be relevant and contain targeted keywords. but always remember keywords variational is also important
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  • Profile picture of the author dadamson
    Yes, keep them related to your site and as kaiserthesage mentions, support keywords is a great way to mix it up.

    Even mixing your main keyword up from "SEO Tools" to "Search Engine Optimization Tools", "Web Promotion Devices", etc is a great technique.

    I normally use the ratio 80/20 when building links, 80% are my exact kws, 20% are variations. I also mix up the capitalization between the whole lot. - This seems to work great for me.

    If you think about it, building thousands of links via anchor text "SEO Tools" is not natural. It is obvious that you are the one building all the links to your site. Although this is the case, Google wants to see more natural results so variations and text that is completely different is actually great, but just focus the majority around your target keyword(s).
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